Even though it is already 2018, not too log ago was still 2017, ad how did I end 2017? Well, because I am a PLP student of course I spent it preparing for the annual winter exhibition. In the past 2 years, our winter exhibitions have been different from each other, they are all based on one thing. In my grade 8 year it was about Star Wars, and last year in PLP 9, it was all about Harry Potter. You can read both of those posts below.
This year it was a lot different. In the pass we have done projects that are based around inquiry questions. Theses are questions that require research or testing to solve, and cannot Ben answered with a simple yes or no. This year we didn’t do that at all. So far this year, every project that we have done has been a podcast: this is because in grade 10 PLP we focus on audio presentations. We have made a podcast on WWI, and on Vancouver and it’s problems. Those are also on my blog.
We had been listening and talking about podcasts the whole first term, we talked about all the different konds of podcasts, how you can have interviews, comedic podcasts, professional podcasts, and a lot more. My favorite to listen to was definitely comedy. Two of my favorites were The Basement Yard and Insanely Chill. I will link them below, but as a warning they all include explicit language and very odd humor.
Even though I really enjoyed listening to those podcasts, it became apparent that I could not make a podcast like these guys: Cody Ko and Joe Santagato dom for obvious school reasons. So I was back to square one. But then I thought, what do I love to do? I love talking. I love talking to people. Interviews, perfect. It also helped that we were making podcasts interviewing people, but that is irrelevant, the point is I like interviews. So to begin we had to make a podcast with a grade 12, and try and get a story out of them. I was very sick that week and had to compromise, so I made a podcast with my brother. This did not work the way I wanted it to. But for the sake of learning and a growth mindset, here it is.
That idea of podcasting with a family member was not done though, as the next weekend we had to make a podcast with a member of our family. For me I was going to pick my brother, that did not work or two reasons: one, I wasn’t allowed to use him twice, and two, he wasn’t very good at them. So for a podcast where we were encouraged to ask a family member about a topic that w knew little to nothing about, I interviewed my mom about when and why she moved to Vancouver. I liked this podcast more.
So, this takes us all the way to the exhibition. Like I mentioned earlier we were not making a project, we made a podcast instead. We were teamed up with a grade 12, the grade 12 that drafted me was Michael Sutherland. His job was producer, he walked around the school during exhibition night, trying to find people for me to interview. He would then bring them into the ‘studio,’ when I would interview them to try and get a story out of them. I interviewed 3 people, they all had good stories but in the end there was one that I liked a lot more. Below is my first draft of the product.
My producer came back, he gave me critique mostly about cleaning up the cuts, and making the podcast a bit more smooth. Here is the second draft that I made.
Not too many years ago, if we wanted to know about a huge event that happened, whether it’s good or it is bad, we would check primary news sources. We would read the newspaper, watch the news, and eventually we would look on the big news websites. But this has changed.
In our modern age of technology, when searching for a primary source concerning an event or landmark, why would we want to know a professional journalists opinion, when we can know what the real citizens think and see? This is when citizen journalism comes in. When someone takes a video or picture of an event or notable topic, and posts it, it becomes citizen journalism. Below is a Ted Talk by Brian Conley about this very topic.
This very interesting and current topic, is one that is very easy to grasp and see on social media. It isn’t an easier way to see news, right? It can be more than that. These videos and photos can be serious pieces of evening in things like police investigations, sporting events and controversy’s, times when humanity is at its highs, lows and much more. It is also included in a lot of books and media sources. A book that we read recently was Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. You can check out his blog Here.
I do not want to spoil the book, but this book is all about social injustice towards the public, specifically youth. In this book the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S) is investigating like crazy after a bombing on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. During that investigation, there are multiple injustices towards the youth and public, and the only way that the youth can have a voice over the government is thought their videos; through citizen journalism. I do not want to give to much away about the book, but in this case it is connected throughout the book, and it is the main resolution piece. I will leave it at that.
When we talk about math and art, we tend to talk about them separately. In school this is very true, math class and art class are very separate topics and ideas, but for this project it is a very different situation. We were presented with a challenge: to make a piece of art or music that included the golden ratio or fibbionacci spiral. The video below briefly describes what this is.
Like you can see in the thumbnail art like the Mona Lisa and a lot of other pieces follow the golden ratio, I took inspiration from this idea and amazing concept, how that these extremely famous and world renowned pieces have this ratio all over of 1:1.6. I wanted to make a piece of art that proved how the golden ratio and fibbionacci spiral make a piece appealing.
This ratio has been used so much that it has become relatively mainstream in the fields of art and visual production, so I decided to make my piece of art reverse black and white and have an endangered species envoled. Reverse black no white means that I have a black background and a white outline and I used the Hawaiian hawk for inspiration for how my birds look.
And then we had to label the art with the golden ratio.
The way that the golden ratio works, is that inside the shape that it makes it also makes a perfect spiral. The way that the wing curves around the whole bird, all the way to the shape of the hear makes what is called a fibbionacci spiral. Also the claws of the birds have that’s same fibbionacci spiral, these are all examples of the golden ratio. The measurements on the diagram are 1: 1/2+square root of 5/2. This is equal to 1:1.6, the golden ratio.
Vancouver is what some people call the perfect city, from the tall, glimmering buildings of downtown, all the way to the forested mountains of North Vancouver and everything in between. But no city is perfect. Vancouver has it’s own fair share of ‘sins’. In this project we are focusing on all of those, we were out in groups for the different kinds of problems. My group of Aiden and Kate were part of the city growth group.
The way we decided this was a vote we took after going to the Museum of Vancouver (MOV). After visiting the museum we took a poll that asked about what our preferred topic was and what in the museum inspired us. I chose the growth of the city, I was inspired by an exhibit about the different views of objects, and the main object that appealed to me was a Lamborghini Aventador engine.
This by itself is relatively impressive, but I was impressed by how there was two sides: what the engine can do, the 6.5 litre, V12 engine, only weighing 235 kg. The other side was how the number of cars like this had doubled in the past few years.
So we had our topic, but it was still very broad, Vancouver had grown in so many ways since the interwar years all the way until now. That is the timeline we were working with, from in-between the two world wars and now. We noticed after all three of us living here our whole lives and through research that no matter what Vancouver is doing, what’s happening inside, and whose here, people are always coming here. In the interwar years tis was based around the forestry industry, now it is more around the general economy, the port, and perhaps the largest is tourism. With more than 9 million people visiting the city each year, it’s doing just fine in the area.
We wanted our podcast o follow the economic booms that Vancouver has experienced, why these booms happen, and why people always love the city. We did a lot of research on these things and then we formed a script around this, and we had some good evidence, but we needed an outside opinion. So we interviewed Tobin Postma, Director of Strategic Issues in Vancouver. His answers were very strong and he elevated our podcast to a professional level, and also his voice sounded really good on the podcast.
Below is the podcast that we made.
This is not the only thing that we did. We also read a book in our groups that related to our topic, so our group, a group about city growth and economy. We were given The International Bank of Bob, a book about finance and world economy. I didn’t really enjoy the story of the book, it was a bit of a compilation of short stories that could’ve had their own book. But, I did understand how it related to our topic of economic growth.
Throughout this book we wrote a series’s of reading responses. We do these quite often in PLP, but in this one we didn’t have a strong many guidelines as we have in the past, this one was more of just a paragraph about our opinions of the book. These were written every week for 4 weeks; so we had 4 reading responses.
The next part of this project was the behind the scenes video, this was to show what we did to make the video, where we went and showed where and how it was interviewing our featured person. The fist video that is below is our first draft that we revised before this post was out.
The most common critique that all groups got on all videos was that we included a little bit too much about the museum, and not enough about the project, so we revised later for the second video draft. This draft is currently being finished up and it should be in this blog post before Christmas.
The final part of this project was an essay that was directly about Vancouver’s ‘Sins of the City’ we each individually wrote an essay that was formatted like a letter to our local MP, Terry Beech. We wrote these about a problem that we think he can fix. My group wrote our essays about the problem with vehicle congestion in heavy areas of tourism, especially Deep Cove, and how we could fix it. Below is my essay first draft.
As you can see, Ms Maxwell had a lot to say about my essay, so after a couple of revisions, here is the final draft of my argumentative essay/letter.
Then as a group we took all of our ideas and combined them into one letter to M
This unit really was a large experience of learning, I definitely learned a lot about the “Sins of the City,’ in a city that in my opinion was perfect. Not just learning about the economic problems now and in the past, but also hearing other groups projects. I learned a lot about indigenous rights, environmentalism, passive housing, and a lot more problems with our beautiful city.
Right now we are working on a larger project about Vancouver and it’s growth, and this project is like a smaller version of this.Also that large project is a podcast, this was a video. We were assigned an area of Vancouver in those groups to make the video about. Me Aiden and Kate were assigned Kitsilano.
The task was to crate a short 1-2 minute video that showed the history of the area, the growth, and most importantly why the area got it’s name from. Below is the attached video, and then below that I will talk abut the creative process.
This video may be short, but it was in fact quite difficult to make, the process was surprisingly long. After a couple days of research, we spent another day writing a script. After that we had too record all of the script. This took a while because it took multiple takes and multiple voices. It took a whole lunch and a few minutes after school to record. Then we had to find videos and images to put in the video.
The final part was we made the garage band music and then put it all together. This video isn’t actually the first draft, the first one we shared with the class. There was an airplay problem and we didn’t have a long enough introduction to the topic. So we revised and made the video what it is, something that I am quite proud of.
So the bidinning of this unit was a bit of a review, so in the very beginning we did a really quick mind map about what we could remember about DNA and genetics. I couldn’t remember much.
Then for a review, because a lot of us remembered as much as I did. The video was a crash course all about DNA, and was one of the most helpful pieces for this unit.
Then we were introduced to the Learning Guide, this was a multi step website that had all of our activities, units and just general learning that we all needed for this unit and eventually the project.
We used this learning guide to make what’s called an OWL chart. It’s a three part chart with one column each for what we Observed, Wondered and what we learned. This chart was interesting because brought together what we could remember from last year, the video that we watched. It also was about what we had learned from the learning guide so far, and what we were expecting to learn later in the unit.
Then we revisited not her coach course video. This one is a more in depth and a continuation on the first one, this one is part 2 of DNA and genetics.
As you can see from the title and the thumbnail this one was more about heredity. Heredity is the passing on of physical or mental characteristics genetically from one generation to another. This is more focused on what we needed for the project, and I went back to look at this for ideas and knowledge review before we made the project.
After we did a bunch more notes, and we had gained a lot more knowledge about the growth of cells, the generation and regeneration of them, we did a thing called a design time. In this, the idea is to imaging a project or scientific experiment that would have infinite resources and funds, this inspires us to ask questions and inquire more about what we were learning.
So for most grade 10s at around this age, we all start to enter the workforce, maybe working a summer job or maybe through the winter as well. This summer I was part of this group, I worked the whole summer at Osaka Sushi in Deep Cove and towards the end of the summer I was also employed at Deep Cove Kayak. I worked both jobs from about the end of August until the beginning of October, so compared to most of my peers I have quite a it of experience working. But this planning section is a lot about safety at the workplace. The first day we took a quiz about work safety.
Then we had quite an expensive class discussion about being safe at work. The dangers that are at the workplace and how we can avoid them. For both of my jobs I could get hurt without trying very hard, working in a kitchen I could get easily burnt, cut and more. Working in Deep Cove on the waterfront I am lifting boats all day, and there is a chance of me dropping them in myself. This has happened. I can also be hit by kayaks, cut myself trying to work with the kayaks and also I am outside in the rain sometimes, so there’s a chance of getting sick as well.
Next what we did is we watched a video. This video is called Lost Youth.
Now, these situation are extreme but the message is clear, the workplace is a dangerous place even when it doesn’t seem like it is.
The final part of this assignment is to make some kind of media that we think relates to the topic of workplace safety, and related to us. I have hinted earlier that I work at Deep Cove Kayak. I am part of the beach crew, our job is to send people out on the water, to make sure they have been given a proper s after talk, they have the right boat, and most importantly that they have the right safety gear. That final part is the most important. From my experience of telling people to wear life jackets, their reaction is often irritation, they’re ‘good swimmers’ and don’t need one. That terrible excuse led me to make an add about life jacket usage and the common statement ‘but I’m a good swimmer.’
This is an add that I believe could be desplayed at any kayak/paddleboard shop or at any place where people are adventuring on the ocean, a river or a lake.
I chose to do this kind of visual instead of one that we talked about in class or that the videos mentioned because this one is close to me. It’s not only a safety precaution I have to deal with at work but I have had a couple experiences where an add like this could’ve made a difference. The best example was a couple years ago in Oregon a very experienced paddle boarder went ‘downwinding’ this is when you surf the waves that strong winds and river currents make. He wasn’t wearing a life jacket or a leash. He was missing for 3 days and on the third day they found his body.
That might sound completely unrelated but during those 3 days I was among the hundreds at the gorge paddle challenge, a race in the exact same place that he was and a race that he was going to participate in. That’s an example of why I see life jackets as a necessity.
What can Trigonometry be used for in the world around us? That question is often used when talking about why we learn trigonometry, and it’s a good one. There are not many triangles in nature, but there’s a lot in things like building, design and architecture.
This relates also to clean energy, when people put solar panels on their house, they have to not only calculate the angle of the panel but also of the sun to where they are.
Before we started the project, we did a lab. The lab was about practicing calculating the ideal angle to the sun. In this project we used wooden blocks, dividers, a small solar panel and the lights to conduct an experiment to determine what the correct number of blocks was, and the trigonometric ratio for the triangle that makes. The document attached is the lab paper.
Our project was to combine all of that, by making a model of a house with a solar panel on it, and explain why it’s at the angle it is to the sun and the house. The challenge was to make a model that was to scale of a real house, that it checked out with the scale of the solar panel matching the scale of the house and with that model we had to include a write up.
My house is set here. On the waterfront in Deep Cove. 49.3268° N, 122.9520° W. I include the coordinates because they are influential to the panel. When you put a solar panel on the roof of a house the way that the angle is determined is you take your latitude: in this case 49.3268° N, and -15° in summer, and add +15° In winter.
Thi house is set in summer, so I took away 15°. Below is the triangle that has the measurements of the model.
That model is a scale. The scale is 1:75. The full dimensions would be 24.5ft x 17.18ft x 18.75ft. In the model that I made though, the measurements are the scale size, but the angles stayed the same. 90°, 56°, and 34°. Below is a few pictures of the scale mode that I made.
I also labeled one of the photos to clarify what’s what.
In the photos you can see a bit of a piece of paper. That is a write up, that write up tells the past few paragraphs I was talking about, it is also attached below.
This project was about trigonometry, a beginning and fundamental unit in math 10. It was relatively easy to learn because we did similar topics in grade 8 and grade 9. The scale model but I found fun because that is one of my skills and something I enjoy, design and architecture. Over all good project where we all learned a lot.
So, this is our first unit as grade 10s. It is a unit about World War One, but this project and the way that we learned is a bit different than just learning abut the war itself. We based the whole project and unit around Canada’s involvement in the war. Why they joined, what was happening in Canada at the time, what they did and more.
We started all of this by talking about what Canada was doing just before the war started. At the tie we were starting to do the things that a new country has to doom we were figuring out things like schooling, but more importantly we were fighting racism, discrimination and more.
Then we started talking about how the war started. Below I have attached a video that we watched, that helped explained the beginning of WWI.
Then we took that information that we had just learned, and a bit more research to make vides in groups, that creatively explain why the war started. I was in a group with Aiden and Lucas and this is what we made…
Then we moved onto Canada’s involvement in the war and why they joined. This was the main project. The first part that we did was to use Government of Canada‘s website, and more specifically their ‘Soldier Archives’ to find a soldier that we found interesting and that we thought we could make a project off of. I chose Harold Dwight Arnott, a pilot during the first world war.
After we talked a bit more about Canada and the war, before we jumped into podcasting. We listened to a podcast called How McDonalds Broke My Heart, a podcast that, if you don’t want to listen, vids the topic by including personal opinions and experiences. I really liked that so I did it as well.
The first podcast we did was kind of a free range podcast, we were told to make a podcast, that answered the projects driving question: How Did WWI Impact Canada’s Identity. below is my first draft.
Side Note- Yes I know theres very distracting images, its how movie works, you need an image and I just selected random ones.
Then we did a peer critique. I was paired up with Robbie and here is what he had to say.
So after the teachers saw what we had made, they decided that we needed to change everything, especially the hook. Our next task was to listen to a ton of podcasts, different genres, moods, formats and lists to how all of them hooked you. Whether it be though setting the tone immediately, or spitting numbers, or the one that I like the most, relating to personal experience or opinion. below is my first 30 seconds.
Then, we took the tone that we had used in our fist 30 seconds and the script that we had revised after our peer critique and we made one final draft of thee podcast. That is the final project for this unit.
So this year, we didn’t just jump into school immediately but we jumped into a field school. We went to camp Capilano, a sleep away camp in Capilano used mostly by school groups on overnights like us.
We had been teased at our one day of school before the day we left that we were going to gave a lot of work, and it started before we left. We were told that we were going to make a trailer to our own “Reality Show” my group of Isobel, Sofia, Bill and Ruby made this.
Then we had to make something else, a minute long trailer for the same show buy only using audio, and in the same group. This sounds like it would be harder, we could only use one sense to captivate the listener, but in fact this was a lot easier. We didn’t have to worry about all of the camera angles, how we were going to look or music as much, we only had to worry about our voices and how those sounded. Our final audio file is attached below.
The final project was to make a podcast, a podcast about identity. We could also make our own groups so I made a group with my friends Aiden and Lucas. We were given about 12 hours to do this. This podcast was super stressful to make and it was incredibly difficult. We spent most of our time trying to get the keys to the Seycove bus so that we could record in there, a peaceful environment. That proved to be a mistake because we spent so much time worrying about that, we dint think about our idea enough and we realized it didn’t fit the idea of developing our ‘identity.’ So we changed our idea to a story about Aiden and Lucas being stuck downtown this summer. Listen Below.